The Spice Girls in 1997, the year after their debut hit Wannabe. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Almost two decades after they zig-a-zig-ahed their way to their first number one, the Spice Girls have achieved another smash: their debut single Wannabe is the catchiest UK hit.

The song, which sold 7 million copies worldwide and topped the chart in 22 countries, was rated the most recognisable track of more than 220 bestselling songs since the 1940s, according to research by the University of Amsterdam in association with Manchester’s Museum of Science & Industry.

The researchers set up an interactive online game, called Hooked On Music, in which participants recorded how recognisable the selected songs – divided into about 1,000 clips – were. Users recognised Wannabe in an average of 2.3 seconds, compared to an average of 5 seconds for other tracks.

The “citizen science experiment” idea was conceived by Dr John Ashley Burgoyne, a computational musicologist from the University of Amsterdam, and produced by Manchester’s Museum of Science & Industry.

The data from more than 12,000 participants was analysed by the academic and colleagues and their initial findings will be presented in Manchester on Saturday night.

Mambo No 5 by Lou Bega was the second most recognisable track at 2.48 seconds, while Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger was third at 2.62 seconds. Lady Gaga, Abba, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston and the Human League also feature in the top 10.

“We were particularly interested in music and memory and why exactly it is that certain pieces of music stay in your memory for such a long time,” Burgoyne told BBC News. “You may only hear something a couple of times yet 10 years later you immediately realise that you have heard it before. Yet other songs, even if you have heard them a lot, do not have this effect.”

The study aimed to identify whether the catchiest songs had similar characteristics. He said he believed that very strong melodic hooks seemed to be the most memorable, but further research would be conducted next year. Few studies had been conducted into this aspect of popular music, the academic added.

The Hooked on Music game will be available online until the end of the year.

Burgoyne said that a better understanding of how our musical memory operates could be applied to research into dementia.

“There has already been some research that shows that if you can find the right piece of music, something that had a very strong meaning, playing that piece of music can be very therapeutic,” he explained.

“But the challenge is figuring out what is the best piece of music.”

Wannabe, which was written by the five Spice Girls with Matt Rowe and Richard Stannard, topped the UK singles chart for seven weeks in the summer of 1996 and managed the same feat for a month on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States the following January. The song won best single at the 1997 Brit Awards despite critical disdain.